Adaptive Path-Following Control of An Autonomous Vehicle with Path-Dependent Constraint Requirements

Constrained operations for autonomous vehicles have been extensively studied in the literature over recent years. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, all of the existing works address only constant or time-varying constraint functions. In this work, we study path-dependent constraint requirements, which explicitly depend on the path parameter, instead of depending on the time variable directly. This formulation of constraints is more practical in reality, where the constraint requirements are often shaped by the environment boundaries. From the system users’ perspectives, it is also much easier to define constraint functions based on the path parameter. A modified version of the universal barrier function is used in the analysis of path-dependent constraint requirements. Furthermore, system unknowns and uncertainties are taken into considerations when designing the adaptive control algorithm. A simulation study further demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme.